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Nicholas Guppy: An Obituary
Nicholas Guppy, who has died aged 86, was a Trinidad-born botanist, writer, environmentalist and explorer whose career was associated with Guyana and the Amazonia. This obituary appeared in London’s
Telegraph.
He first made his mark shortly after the Second World War when still in his twenties he led a number of expeditions into the interior of British Guiana (now Guyana) and afterwards to the northern Amazonian jungles, where he lived for several years among the Wai-Wai people.
Guppy also founded the Primitive Peoples’ Fund, now known as Survival International.
His expeditions were exotically recounted in two books, the first of which, Wai-Wai (1958), described remote regions of the upper Essequibo river on the Brazilian border, uncharted when Guppy first saw them in 1949 and penetrated only two or three times before.